From Neural Criterial Causation to a Premotor Theory of Human Imagination

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• Professor Peter Ulric Tse, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover. USA
• Friday 29 November 2024, 16:30-18:00
• Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sara Seddon.

The host for this talk is Tristan Bekinschtein

In this talk, I will discuss a form of causation operating among neurons that emphasizes dendritic sensitivity to the arrival of coincident presynaptic spikes, and the rewiring of synaptic weights on a millisecond timescale. Such “criterial causation” is “late Wittgensteinian” in the sense that possible outcomes are neither random nor determined but rather adequate and unpredictable, subject to “family resemblances”. Such a neural code allows, say, a jaguar to do otherwise, but not to become otherwise than it is. In contrast, humans can not only do otherwise, they can also become otherwise. I then ask what makes human imagination so different from that of a jaguar? I will argue that the radical creativity of human imagination arose through a process of demodularization whereby previously (i.e. in a chimp-like ancestor) encapsulated operators came to operate on the operands of other modules. I will argue that this “disencapsulation of promiscuous operators” arose in part via the application of internal dexterous hand movements that permitted complex operations to take place within an internal virtual mental workspace before executing any operations in the world. fMRI experiments that test some of these ideas will be discussed.

This talk is part of the Zangwill Club series.

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